E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband – Part VI

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband – Part V

Finally, both Jon and Dave comment further on where we are with both the enterprise and the Web 2.0 space and how a successfully merge into would become eventually Enterprise 2.0 would have the break the current polarity we are under: the enterprise guys reject social computing as anarchy and the social computing folks reject any formal structure and excessive control (Extreme order versus extreme anarchy, that Jon sums up quite nicely).

Dave concludes the podcast with Jon by saying something that will make plenty of folks think about it for a while: everybody he knows as an expert in Web 2.0 avoids being associated with the Knowledge Management word like a plague, based on its reputation for over-structure. He thinks KM is in the Long Tail and is going to disappear as a formal organisational title. The function will become much more important though, but it will be requiring a massive shift: the collapse of the dominance of the IT department. There should be more security that would go on the corporate data, and less security on the collaboration going beyond the firewall! (Brilliant!)

Just fantastic! As you may have been able to see from the series of blog posts I have thoroughly enjoyed the podcast and I am surely glad that they have both shared with us. You can now get a glimpse of why I have been recommending it to a bunch of different folks, from both ends of the spectrum (That pendulum that Dave mentioned). If Enterprise 2.0 is going to make it into the corporate world, I am certain we would need to go through a number of different changes. Some of those are already in place, but for some of the others we still need to do some more work and both Dave and Jon have just paved out what lays ahead and where we should be going. I am not sure what you would be thinking, but we are facing some exciting times ahead of us, don’t you think?

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Anarchy, Structured Unstructured, Long Tail, IT Department, Control, Trust, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0

The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband – Part V

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband – Part IV

Heading now into the second part of the podcast, where Jon asks the question of whether it is still valuable, from a traditional KM perspective, to do audits of knowledge assets within a business, now that Web 2.0 is becoming more and more Enterprise 2.0 savvy and the variety of platforms has increased tremendously. Would there be a change in the scope?

Dave’s quick answer: Forget using the word audit, as it still implies the concept of knowledge as static, i.e. it is a thing, probably going back to the model of both tacit and explicit knowledge. To him, the most effective knowledge exists in flows (Going back to his second KM rule I mentioned in a previous blog post). "The human knowledge is the real time assembly of multiple fragmented memories in a real time context to create a new unique application. A knowledge audit, you cannot audit fragments".

He concludes that Web 2.0 is too unstructured in its own to make the knowledge it contains a complete corporate asset. And as such it would be too difficult to categorise, yet to organise. According to Dave ,categories and keywords (as in tags) will be crucial. ("There are no deep structures in language") The combination of taxonomies and folksonomies into coming up with a defined tagging convention is probably where the next challenge is going to be.

Dave already provides some good tips that I am not going to spoil, so that you can listen to them, on where we should be heading. Here is a hint. The most sophisticated thing is human based tagging. "Human beings have evolved to handle context. Computes haven’t". Fascinating stuff for those folks who are into semantics and the semantic Web, context, reputation, trust, etc.

So, in the end, we should not be focusing on those knowledge audits per se, but on "a map of the dependency of your core business processes on knowledge objects". The only way you can agree to invest in any Knowledge Management program is "if you got the right relevance to things that matter to executives with money". Goodness! This is just so spot on! I am really glad that Dave did mention that in the podcast, because it surely puts things in perspective on what should be one of the main areas to focus on: those knowledge objects ("anything coherent that we can see how we can manage and tests to be unique to every organisation"). And it gets better … Bottom up = knowledge objects, Top down = metrics … Go and have a listen

To be continued …

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Knowledge Flow, Fragmented Knowledge, Knowledge Audit, Tagging, Tags, Kewords Categories, Categorisation, Folksnomy, Context, Knowlede Objects, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0

The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband – Part IV

Continued from The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband – Part III

"Knowledge work becomes the way we do things around here"

"It’s not something subject to corporate objectives or focus or to formal roles". Perhaps the end of what we used to know as traditional Knowledge Management. WOW! How is that for an statement! (Loved it!) And what about this other one: "The role of the technology (IT) department is to create connectivity between people". Or this one: "It is time for the firewalls to be brought in to the raw data [...], but for everything to do with e-mail, collaboration and exchange, there is no point in making a corporate decision about that [...]. Let people go free in the Web. [...] It is much more fluid and is free and people now well adopt and pick up new tools very quickly. [...] Novelty is very important [...]"

(Not going to spoil what Dave mentioned just after this, but it is just priceless and a clear indication of where we are heading on the existence, or non-existence, of collaboration tools behind the corporate firewall. You will enjoy his quote on what should be done with mail attachments and, even better, what the role of the IT department should be like!! Not quite what you would be expecting, I am quite sure! )

From there onwards Jon gets to touch base on a couple of points that Dave mentioned throughout the podcast on the motivation of sharing knowledge and the voluntary need of exchanging information with other knowledge workers versus reaching whatever targets and how incentivation for knowledge work paved out for him. Worth while listening to his story, because it is also one of those that clearly defines the role of incentives in a knowledge sharing culture, which then Dave comes to complement rather nicely giving the example of how McKenzie does it (An eye-opener, to say the least), along with a lovely trip down the memory lane on how consultants and consultant work came together till today. Worth while listening to it, if you are a consultant and want to know where it all got started and where we are now.

To be continued …

Tags: Jon Husband, Wirearchy, Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Podcast, Podcasting,  Connections, People, Conversations, Control, IT Department, Firewall, Motivation, Volunteering Knowledge, Learning, Knowledge Management 1.0, KM 1.0, KM 101, Knowledge Management 2.0, KM 2.0, Collaboration 2.0